Eran Egozy: Music for the Masses

(graphics whooshing) (gentle upbeat music) - When I was at MIT, my major was electrical engineering and computer science.

Then I found out about the MIT Media Lab.

That was a group that directly combined computers and music together.

Alex Rigopulos and I were thinking about taking all this technology and making it useful for everyday people, not just for expert musicians.

The big aha moment came when Alex who was at the time really into video games, took the joystick from the flight simulator and said, "Hey Eran, what if you took this joystick and hooked it up to the music program we've been working on?"

So I said, "That seems like a cool idea."

And in about a couple of days, I had set up and working.

And what we had was this thing that for lack of a better name, we call joystick music.

If you move the joystick left and right, the notes would rise and fall.

If you move the joystick up and down, the notes would get faster and slower.

But no matter what you did, it always sounded good.

So we programmed sort of the thought process and the mechanics of a master musician or an improviser into the computer.

(gentle music) That's when Harmonix was born.

The goal of this company was to bring the joy of music making and the joy of music performance to everyone out there.

There were plenty of dark moments at Harmonix where we weren't sure if we were gonna see the next day.

The first 10 years we were working very hard on a lot of different things but nothing was really panning out in a big way.

And then all of a sudden we did Guitar Hero.

(gentle guitar music) You know, we just got the package right.

Between the guitar peripheral itself, the music selection for the game, you know the characters in the game, the moment to moment experience of playing the game, everything completely worked.

And from that day, you know, the world changed.

This great feeling you have when you're playing music, very few people get to experience that.

And what we've done with games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero is tried to grab some of those feelings, some of those hard to describe connections that you can get with people because of music.

(team cheering)